He was an inch from my panties when I finally snapped myself out of it and swatted his hand away. “Hope you enjoyed last night because it's the last time you get anywhere near my pussy,” I managed to choke out in what I hoped was a stern voice.
His smile didn't falter, if anything, it got all the more sinister. “I did enjoy last night. You got one sweet pussy for someone so fucking sour. But I can tell you one thing, as much as I enjoyed last night...” Oh, crap. I knew what was coming. “You enjoyed it a helluva lot more. Or was I imagining your pussy squeezing my finger as you came hard enough to wake up my neighbors?”
“Tell me something, honey,” I said, lowering my eyes at him, feeling embarrassment lead me steadily toward anger which was a much more comfortable emotion to be feeling around him. “Do you always molest half-asleep women who are taking refuge in your bed after getting the shit kicked out of them?”
Cash slowly got to his feet, not taking a single step backward and therefore was privy to the sensation of my hardened nipples (fucking traitors) brush his chest. “Nope. You're the first,” he said with a casual shrug. The bastard was supposed to feel guilty even though I knew damn well I had consented. “So why don't you want to go to Hailstorm?”
I could tell from the lack of light in his eyes that he wasn't going to give in. He wasn't going to stop until he got an answer. I shook my head, looking off over his shoulder into the sprawling backyard that endless houses seemed to share. “Look... I didn't always have Hailstorm. And before them, I still had to survive in this life. I got into some shit. I got out of some shit. I don't want any of the dirt from my past thrown at them. Yeah, they'd be all too happy to wipe it off and help me handle it, but I don't want them involved.”
I looked back to see him biting on the inside of his cheek, a habit I found myself wondering about. Was it a nervous tick? Was it anger? Was it something he did when he was mulling things over?
“Fair enough,” he finally said, surprising me enough to jerk back. “Look... when shit went down with Summer, Reign didn't want to bring the club in on it. That wasn't their mess to clean up. I get it. So no Hailstorm. But you need to get some of your shit.”
I felt myself nodding, moving a step back and hating that it always seemed to be me that was retreating. “I have a bag in a storage locker in town.”
“Got a key or combination? I'll drop by and pick it up. I got some shit to handle today.”
“I can get it.”
“Nah. I think you're best staying put right now.”
“You're not my father, Cash. You can't fucking ground me.”
“No. But I can cuff you to a beam in the basement,” he said, looking like he would enjoying doing just that a little bit too much. “You know... for your own safety,” he grinned. “Not for any other more... sinister reasons. Totally wouldn't molest your very consenting pussy any more than I already have. Nope. Not me. I'd be a perfect gentleman about the whole thing.”
“You can't be serious.” No fucking way.
“Babydoll,” he said, making me curl my lip slightly, “no one would ever accuse me of being serious. But let me tell you, about this... I am dead fucking serious. You are staying in this house and you are laying low until we figure this shit out.” He paused, his cocky grin coming back. “Or at least until people out there,” he waved toward the front door, “can look at you without wincing.”
“Listen you cocky, condescending, c....”
“Like the alliteration thing you got going on, but I got shit to do so give me the combination or key and let me get on my way. Or keep wearing nothing but my tees. It's nice having the easy access,” he said, moving forward at me and reaching behind me, slipping his hand up the back of my shirt then under my panties to squeeze my ass.
Pants.
I needed some fucking pants.
With suspenders.
Or a chastity belt.
“Center Street Storage, number seventy-eight. The combination is forty-two, thirteen, twenty-seven.”
His hand did another small squeeze before it pulled completely away. “I find you stepped one foot out of my front door and make no mistake, you'll become intimately acquainted with the basement floor.”
I felt my eyes rolling. “What? How are you even going to know? You have nanny cams around here?” I asked his back as he moved toward the front door, grabbing his jacket off a hook behind the door as he went.
“Nah. I live in the fucking suburbs. I got neighbors,” he said with a smirk as he went out the front door.
I grimaced at the closed door, knowing all-too-well how nosy neighbors could be. Hell, that was half of the reason I built Hailstorm up on a hill in the middle of nowhere. No one could get all up in my business.
I sighed, looking around his apartment. I was going to go stir crazy stuck in his place for god-knew how long. I went toward the living room, finding my cell on the coffee table and sitting down to call Janie. Again.
Six times later... still no answer.
I put my coffee down and shot her a text.
I know it was you, honey. I don't care. I just want to know you're okay. We can sort this out together. Call me. Anytime. I love you.
Then I made a call that had my stomach swirling so hard that I felt my coffee threatening to make another appearance as I forced myself to swallow hard.
“Morgue.”
“It's Lo. Put Doc Fenton on.”
There was a pause before another, deeper, sexier voice picked up. “Looking for a body again, Lo?”
God, I hoped to Christ not.
“Mid twenties female, thin, covered in ink, long dark hair, blue eyes.”
“Not the usual big bad then?” he asked and I heard papers flipping. “Nah, Lo. Out of luck this time.”
“In luck,” I clarified and I heard the sadness in my own voice.
“Oh,” Fenton said, sounding almost concerned. “I'll keep an eye out for you, okay?”
“Yeah. I appreciate that.”
“Be careful, Lo.”
“Always,” I agreed, hanging up.
She wasn't dead. Well, that wasn't exactly accurate. She wasn't at the morgue. But that was something at least. I'd known Janie for years. I knew her better than anyone else in the world. But, then again, I only knew her as well as she would allow me to know her. It was something she and I had in common. As much as she did know, there was a lot about me that she had no idea of- that no one did. One of those things was somewhere lying in wait for me to fuck up again so he could finish what he started in the safe house.
Maybe Cash was right in insisting I lay low.
“Augh,” I grimaced at even thinking that he was right about something.
It wasn't that I hated Cash. I didn't have the kind of animosity he seemed to harbor for me. If anything, I actually liked the bastard. He managed to belong to a bike gang and not be a chauvinistic pig. He was confident and endearing. He was charming. But underneath all of that, he was a cool, calm, collected, merciless, unshakable man. I'd seen him walk into a loathed skin trader's house and keep his very obvious rage under control and let me take the lead. Then when shit went down, he dove into the thick of it like he was raised in chaos, never once hesitating or second-guessing himself.
All of that, though, was exactly the problem.
I respected him.
On top of that, I was attracted to him.
And I was proving wholly incapable of fighting it.
That was simply unacceptable. I wasn't that kind of woman. I had always been able to keep myself under control. I always took the lead. I never let a man get the better of me. Well, at least it had been a long, long time since I had let that happen. But there was Cash, younger than me, less serious in all ways than me... and he was making me lose control. How the hell did that happen?
And, more importantly, how could I stop it from happening in the future?
Eleven
Cash
I dialed
in the combination at her locker, more than a little curious about what she might have stored away, what little pieces of her I could pick up on. She kept herself locked down so tight and I found myself wanting to know more. But my excitement quickly got extinguished when I pushed the garage door up and found the entire unit empty except for the large Army green duffle bag in the center of the cement floor.
Who the hell rented a large storage unit to store a bag?
With a shrug, I hefted the considerable weight up and tucked it into the trunk of Lo's little car and hit the road again.
Reign had been texting me all morning, asking about the Mallicks at first while he was still tucked away at home with Summer. But then, when he got to the compound and found that Wolf still hadn't checked in, he was all up my ass about getting over there and checking on things. Wolf may have been a bit of a recluse, but he always showed his face around the clubhouse if something serious was going on.
So I drove out of the industrial part of town, through the shitty part, and further out to where it went woodsy and rural. Wolf lived up a hill that made climbing it by anything other than foot (or his monster-sized truck) all but impossible. I parked at the bottom and cursed him in new and inventive ways as I hauled it up the hill and through the woods to where it finally broke around a small log cabin that Wolf had taken years to build by his own two hands.
“You better be shacked up in here with some grade-A pussy if you're not showing up at church,” I called through the door, not bothering to knock. The place was small, he would hear me if he was inside. When I heard nothing from inside, I turned and looked off into the seemingly endless woods with a growing sense of dread. “Oh you fuck. If I have to hunt you down...”
The door swung open behind me, making me whirl back around to find Wolf completely overtaking the doorway, his hand on the side of the door as if blocking my entrance. “Cash,” he said, nodding his head at me.
“The fuck you doing up here when bombs are going off?”
“Anything I can do?” he asked, knowing damn well there wasn't, that we had it handled.
“That's not the point, Wolf. You don't miss church. Reign was worried. Now that he knows you ain't dead in one of your fucking tree stands or something, he's gonna be pissed.”
“I'll deal with him,” he said with a shrug.
He'd... deal with him? Wolf may have been our oldest friend, the little (but giant) quiet kid who used to stand lookout for me and Reign when we were getting ourselves into trouble, the guy who once took on half a bar of rival bikers when Reign refused to 'move out of their section'... but that personal history never changed the fact that he always treated Reign and the club with respect. He always showed, he always did his part, let his loyalty speak for itself seeing as the bastard never really said much of anything.
Something was up. And fuck if I didn't need one more god damn complication in my life at that moment.
“What the fuck did you get yourself into now, man?”
“Nothin',” he said, but he wouldn't meet my eye, he was looking off over my shoulder.
“There are fucking bombs going off all over. No one has a god damn idea who is setting them. Repo is up my ass about not being around enough and I can't be around because I got fuckin' Lo begging asylum at my house 'cause she got trouble and she won't involve Hailstorm in it...”
Shit. Fuck god damn it. Me and my big mouth. No one was supposed to know anything about Lo, not even Wolf who would probably never string enough words together to tell anyone anyway.
“Lo?” a female voice asked from inside, making me quiet my internal battle and look at Wolf.
His head was thrown back, facing the sky, his eyes closed, like he thought someone just fucked something up.
I felt my smile quirk up, my sour mood lifting slightly. “I fuckin' knew you had a skirt in there,” I chuckled, ducking under his hand before he could stop me and pushing inside his one-room house.
There was a small kitchenette to the left against the side wall, a little table beside it, a recliner in front of a massive TV, and his giant bed. That, and the door to the bathroom, was all he had inside his house, not that it would fit much more than that anyway.
My eyes went right to the bed where a girl was sitting cross-legged, a little busted up looking herself- white gauze wrapped up her arm, a bunch of scrapes down the side of one of her cheeks. Her long dark hair was pulled into a low ponytail and she was dressed in one of Wolf's white tees which, given that he was practically a giant and she was a tiny slip of a thing, completely swallowed up her body down to her knees.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” I said, rolling my eyes.
Because she wasn't just any skirt.
She was Lo's fucking little protege.
She was the smart-as-a-whip, loud-mouthed, badass, tactical genius covered in ink with walls high enough around her to make Lo's walls look like a kid's playpen.
Janie.
Wolf moved inside, but left the door open and I took it as a none too subtle invitation for me to leave at any time.
“Well well well,” I smiled, too amused for any of our good. “Look at this little development...”
“Cash,” Wolf's deep voice warned, but I completely ignored it.
“She's not your usual type, man,” I said, nodding at her. “But, hell, if you can put up with that smart mouth,” I winked at Janie. I was fucking with her. I liked me a woman with a smart mouth, but she was always fun to get a rise out of, and that was just what I was getting as she moved herself up onto her knees on the center of the bed and glared at me.
“The operative word there being 'smart',” she started, moving toward the end of the bed and hopping off. “I know. It's a foreign concept to someone who barely has two brain cells to rub together and when he does, all they do is scream out 'pussy, pussy, pussy', but some of us actually have...”
“Retract the claws, kitten,” I laughed, winking at her as I chucked her chin. “I was messing with you.”
“Oh,” she said, immediately deflating and I wouldn't be wrong to say she looked a little disappointed to miss out on a fight. She took a breath and looked up at me with those big blues of hers. “Why is Lo staying with you?”
“I dunno. Why you staying with Wolf?” I countered, worried about the tongue-lashing Lo would give me if I shared her secret. Yeah, me, worried about a chick. What the fuck was happening? Her chin lifted defiantly and she stayed silent. And, as always, so did Wolf. “You alright, kid?” I asked, reaching out to touch the bandage. It was the barest of brushes over the gauze, but she shrieked and wrenched away. “The fuck...”
“Time to go,” Wolf said, moving to step between me and Janie and it was clear that, for the first time, Wolf was standing against one of his brothers.
I bit into the inside of my cheek, rocking back on my heels for a second, trying to figure out if I should press the issue or not. In the end, it really wasn't my place, it was Reign's place and, frankly, when it came to chastising a man we had known our entire lives, yeah, I'd much rather my brother be the one to handle that shit.
“Alright,” I said, putting my hands up and moving back a few steps. “But pick up your fucking phone and call Reign or you're gonna have a group of Henchmen up here asking questions and airing your laundry. Janie, kitten,” I said, leaning past Wolf's body so I could see her (and it didn't escape me that she was watching Wolf's back with her brows drawn together in utter confusion). “Take care of that arm. I'll see you around.”
I took the descent much more slowly than I had the ascent and, for once, it had nothing to do with the uneven footing. Or maybe everything to do with it, but in a much more figurative way.
It wasn't that I'd never had woman trouble before. But it had been a different kind of trouble. It was always: 'how do I get this woman into bed' trouble, or 'how do I break it to this woman that she ain't gonna be my old lady' trouble, or even 'how do I get this chick to stop slashing the tires on my bi
ke' trouble.
I had never liked a woman just as intensely as I disliked her before. What the fuck did that say about me, that I could be so attracted to someone who did shit I thought was inexcusable? Yes, she was a challenge. Yes, that was always like fuckin' catnip to me. Still, it didn't make sense.
Maybe it was just desire. I could be that base and simple at times. If the woman was hot enough, I was willing to jump through hoops and look past a lot of crazy shit to get a taste of her.
And, having had a taste of Lo, well let's just say I wanted more. I wanted it all. I wanted to know what she felt like writhing beneath me. I wanted to know what my name sounded like being gasped from her lips as she came. I wanted to know how it felt to have her lips wrapped around my cock. I wanted to know if she was as wild and wanton as I imagined her to be. Did she dirty talk? Was she open to different positions? Could I get her to the point of no return, where she was willing to say, cry, beg for me to give her release? Could I get underneath her walls and peek at the woman underneath?
“Jesus Christ,” I groaned, getting to the car, shaking my head at my reflection in the windows.
I needed to figure out what her problem was, fix it for her, and get her the hell out of my life before there was no turning back.
Twelve
Lo
I heard the car a few hours later while I was elbow deep in cooking ingredients. To my surprise, and utter delight, Cash actually didn't have a bachelor's fridge (meaning full of meat and leftover takeout and wholly devoid of essentials like butter, eggs, or garlic). He was stocked to the gills and I couldn't help but wonder about him moving around his kitchen with the practiced ease he seemed to handle everything in his life, making meals.
Cash (The Henchmen MC Book 2) Page 8